Bored and middle-aged? Need a little more kick in the old life? Try binging on alcohol! Famed director Thomas Vinterberg puts four friends through the paces of this dubious rejuvenating method in Another Round, a shaggy, curiously detached treatment of a midlife crisis.

Frumpy Martin (Mads Mikkelsen, playing against his usual debonair type) feels becalmed in his marriage and has trouble getting through to his high school students at his teaching job. One evening, he joins fellow male teachers at a restaurant for a birthday celebration. One of them approvingly cites the finding of a psychiatrist and philosopher, one Finn Skarderud, who recommends drinking to maintain a consistent blood alcohol level of .05. A constant buzz will make them more creative and more relaxed (and, it’s implied, more masculine).

Martin’s objections to this guiding principle and reluctance to get behind the wheel after multiple snorts meet a resounding pooh-pooh: “Russia was built by people who drink vodka and drive!” With that, the teachers resolve to pursue this brilliant idea (and thin plot premise) together, painstakingly gauging their intake’s effect minute by minute.

Soon Martin and his pals are nipping hooch in secret on the job. A music teacher coaxes indifferent students into glorious song. A soccer coach brings out the best in a shy boy on the soccer team. Martin dares to get boldly sexy with his distant wife on a camping trip, and even evangelizes for drunkenness among his history students, citing alcohol as a booster to the career of Winston Churchill (never mind that Churchill was an atypical genius whose boozing tragically caught up with him at the end of his life). It’s not long, though, before the experiment goes awry. The gang’s partying devolves into bloody noses, collapses, domestic strife, and worse.

There’s a lot of potential drama in this crew’s self-created downward trajectory, but the movie approaches their story lines on the low boil as crucial emotional details go missing. Marriages break up just like that, with no confrontations or much reaction at all. The quartet of drunks disgrace themselves, but they feel little of a chief defining emotion connected to alcohol abuse—shame.

Meanwhile, the men rely on women for a lot, but they don’t really see them, and the screenplay follows suit in its characterizations. Wives are harridans or just checked out, and a headmistress understandably concerned about teachers getting smashed on school grounds is portrayed as a nosy battle-axe.

Another Round reads like a backhanded bro movie, but where’s the breakout Wedding Crashers fun? Perhaps it wanted to flirt with the excitement of a liquor high, but it feels more like the shaky downswing of a buzz.